We would go to the bank, and have to take this book to the teller, who would find in their records a copy of our “bank book”, then they would enter in both books the fact that we had withdrawn $ 20.00 so that means we have $ 280.00 left. The teller would write this in their book, and in our copy of their book, and hand our booklet back to us.

There was a great depression in which a lot of banks went out of business & people lost what was in the banks.

Technology that was the forerunners to modern day computers came into being back in the 19th century by a US inventor called Babbage, but it was not really until Hollerith invented a way to do programming with punched cards that Tabulating equipment really took off.

The way this worked, is each punched card could have from 80-96 characters or digits on the card. There would be a few characters taken up to idnetify the kind of record … customer name & address, customer withdrawal, customer deposit, interest, and whatever.

Each kind of card had maybe 10 positions for the customer account #, so the sorting machines could put all the cards for one customer together. This had to be sorted one column at a time … so we would sort the low digit first, then work our way up to the higher digits.

During WW II, there was rapid development, including an electro mechanical way to do the punched card technology, which after the war got developed into what was at the time called Mainframe computers, that were so expensive that the only places that could afford to have them were like Fortune 100 companies.

In the 1960′s the Mini Computer got invented, and the computer revolution really took off then, because any medium to large company could afford to have computer technology, but it was still too expensive for small companies, and individual people.

I got my first work on computers at companies using the old tabulating equipment, IBM 1440, IBM 1620, that by today’s standards, baby computers.

The first place I worked stored punched cards in drawers that came out of file cabinets … 3,000 cards would fit in one drawer … we had room after room filled with filing cabinets with these cards … millions of punched cards … we would move the drawers of cards on special tables with wheels, maybe 9 drawers at a time, piled up on each other, to run them thru the sorting machines.

One employer wanted us all to wear a tie. One day I sported a tie that had been scissored half way down, because my tie had caught in sorting machine, and scissoring it was the only way I could get myself extricated.

We did not use punched cards exclusively. Punched paper tape was used to control printers … there was like a moibus loop with holes punched in it, to tell the printer where to skip down to when printing different kinds of stuff, in a repeating pattern.

For the early mini-computers, the programs were punched cards … the compiler was a deck of maybe 1,000 cards, source code for a program was limited in size by today standards because no program could be larger than around 64k, which took maybe an inch of cards in execution form.

Later, when we got decent hard disk space, which was still so expensive that we were laying the groundwork for Y2K, we got to store the programs on disk, and only needed 2-5 carts to invoke whichever program …in front of those trays of thousands of cards & God help you if you had a jam.

I first found out about Y2K when I needed to do a conversion at my employer, which was using a single digit for the year. I told various people that the solution I had come up with would work for 1969, 1979, and 1989, provided we did not need more than 7 contiguous years of data (I was doing math against current year to figure out the year in the data base) but we would need a different solution for 1999.

I figured that I was probably not the first programmer to realize we would have a Y2K problem, so I went hunting the literature & sure enough, it was a well known problem, that most of the geeks knew about, but none of us could get business managers to put it on their radar screens.

In the 1970′s the Micro Computer got invented, which was the forerunner to today’s Personal Computer … I bought my first one of those around 1975 … at that time a home computer cost like $ 15,000.00 and a personal automobile cost like $ 10.000.00 … this first PC that I got used a floppy diskette for what today we use a hard drive for. It had 56k memory, which was better than state of art … I got a deal from one of the PC designers that you never hear of any more.

It was not until the 1980′s that PC’s got powerful enough to be of any help in small business applications.